“Trips and Neurotransmitters: Discovering Principled Patterns across 6,850 Hallucinogenic Experiences”, Galen Ballentine, Samuel Freesun Friedman, Danilo Bzdok2022-03-16 (QS, psychedelics)⁠:

Psychedelics probably alter states of consciousness by disrupting how the higher association cortex governs bottom-up sensory signals. Individual hallucinogenic drugs are usually studied in participants in controlled laboratory settings.

Here, we have explored word usage in 6,850 free-form testimonials [from Erowid] about 27 drugs through the prism of 40 neurotransmitter receptor subtypes, which were then mapped to 3-dimensional coordinates in the brain via their gene transcription levels from invasive tissue probes.

Despite high interindividual variability, our pattern-learning approach delineated how drug-induced changes of conscious awareness are linked to cortex-wide anatomical distributions of receptor density proxies. Each discovered receptor-experience factor spanned between a higher-level association pole and a sensory input pole, which may relate to the previously reported collapse of hierarchical order among large-scale networks.

Co-analyzing many psychoactive molecules and thousands of natural language descriptions of drug experiences, our analytical framework finds the underlying semantic structure and maps it directly to the brain.